Extracts from Race and History (1952) and Race and Culture (1971) : Claude Levi-Strauss

Résumé du document

Claude Lévi-Strauss (born 1928) is a French anthropologist who introduced the Strucuralism in anthropology. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and obtained a chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France (1959-1982). In 1960, he founded the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (LAS). He joined the Academie française in 1973. In the both extracts, Claude Lévi-Strauss wants to fight against racism, not only with discrediting the basis on which it is seemingly founded, but also with finding its more profound roots.

Extraits

[...] Yet a civilization consists in the coexistence of cultures exhibiting their differences so this concept can't exist in the reality. The true contributions of a country actually consist not in all the inventions it has produced, but in its differences from the others. In Race and Culture, he begins writing that the recent works by geneticists can make people think that genetic recombination can play the same role as cultural recombination in the evolution of the ways of life, technique, knowledge of societies and that racism is reappearing with a big intensity. [...]

[...] Extracts from Race and History (1952) and Race and Culture (1971) Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss (born 1928) is a French anthropologist who introduced the Strucuralism in anthropology. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and obtained a chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France (1959-1982). In 1960, he founded the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (LAS). He joined the Academie française in 1973. (http://www.academie- francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=647, http://www.science.gouv.fr/fr/actualites/bdd/res/2975/claude-levi-strauss-a- 100-ans/). In the both extracts, Claude Lévi-Strauss wants to fight against racism, not only with discrediting the basis on which it is seemingly founded, but also with finding its more profound roots. [...]

[...] I think Claude Lévi-Strauss could have more developed this last point about the real roots of racism. It would have been interesting to carry out a questionnaire-based study and an ethnographic study (in order to make questions adapted to the country, according to Philippe d'Iribarne in The Usefulness of an Ethnographic Approach to the International Comparison of Organizations,1996-1997) about the opinion of people concerning subjects as their relations with another and the demographic explosion. It's essential to know more about the relations of people with another to set up adapted solutions in order to make them work on the situation, and ideally lead them to develop more cohesion and fraternity. [...]

[...] Without this collaboration and this variety, cultures are almost doomed to fail. So the American cultures, which had fewer relations and so were much more homogeneous than Europe, loosed against conquerors. Because of these influences, many cultures try to prove what contributions they have brought to others. But it is a waste of time: first you can never be certain about the origin of an invention or a discovery. All the more it's useless to research the origin of minor contributions. [...]